Hunger makes monsters in this dark new tale in Nghi Vo's Hugo Award-winning Singing Hills Cycle.
Wandering Cleric Chih of Singing Hills and their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant come to the river town of Baolin chasing stories of a legendary famine. Amid tales of dishes served to royalty and desserts made of dust, they discover the secrets of what happens when hunger stalks the land and what the powerful will do to hide their crimes.
Trapped in the mansion of a sinister magistrate, Chih and Almost Brilliant must learn what happened in Baolin when the famine came to call, and they must do so quickly... because the things in the shadows are only growing hungrier.
The Singing Hills Cycle has been shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award, and the Ignyte Award, and has won the Crawford Award and the Hugo Award.
The novellas are standalone stories linked by the Cleric Chih, and may be read in any order.

My Review:

Cleric Chih’s Singing Hills Abbey is not precisely an archive of history. Not that it isn’t an archive, and not that it doesn’t preserve history. But it’s not a historical archive in the sense that we think of one. It’s not a place that stores original documents in an attempt to record history without bias or interpretation.

The Singing Hills Abbey, and its collection, exists at the intersection of “we make gods in our own image” and “fiction is the lie that tells the truth”.

The Singing Hills Abbey doesn’t send out its clerics to collect documents – it sends those clerics, including Cleric Chih and all those who have come before them and will come after them, to collect STORIES about history. As well as stories in general.

Their purpose is not to discover the FACTS – often those are already known. It is to discover the stories, myths and legends that people tell each other as a way of both preserving the memory of the event AND its consequences at the same time.

Because those stories commemorate the things that people want to have remembered – and hide, either by omission or in plain sight or both, the parts that are so terrible that they wish they could forget.

Cleric Chih is not supposed to become part of the stories they record. That’s not the reason the Abbey sends them out to collect those stories. In this case, the story that Chih is sent to record is the story of a devastating, THREE year long famine that occurred TWENTY years ago in Baolin.

It shouldn’t be possible for Cleric Chih to become part of THAT story. But, between the connivance of an unappeased ghost and the coercion of a guilty magistrate Chih gets caught in the middle of a truth that refuses to remain hidden a single moment longer.

All because Chih stopped along the way to Baolin and decided to do the right thing by a tiny white cat and an even tinier cache of long-forgotten human bones.

Escape Rating A+: In some ways, this is, at least so far, the hardest book in the Singing Hills Cycle. Not because of what happens to Chih, and not even because of the events that happen to Chih in the story.

But it’s a hard story because of the way it exposes the truth of Baolin, the truth of Chih’s mission and the purpose of the Singing Hills Abbey, and a whole lot of extremely uncomfortable truths about the all-too-frequent inhumanity of humans.

Because this is a story about the hard calculus of survival, as seen through the stories of an entire village that survived three years of famine because they made those calculations and did what was necessary for their own survival.

Chih has come to record their stories, but only after hopefully enough time has passed for the traumatized remnant of the town’s original population to have found ways to both relate and cope with the personal truths of what they experienced. Because what they experienced was the human condition at the depths of desperation, ‘red in tooth and claw’ – and knife and soup pot.

Chih doesn’t expect a pretty story, because there are plenty of famine stories preserved at the Abbey. And they are all different but they are also very much the same. That those who survived sacrificed everything they believed was true about themselves in order to live just one more day.

Over and over and over again. And it’s tragic, it’s terrible, and it’s ultimately extremely human.

But the story that Chih eventually discovers, the story that the magistrate has hidden for decades amid protestations of morality and atonement, tells an even more terrible story than the one they believed they had come for.

It’s a story about the way that ALL the variables change when there’s nothing left. And that the directives that held sway in normalcy turn out to be the greatest of sins at the hard sharp end of catastrophe.

In the end, this is not a comfortable read, and Cleric Chih is far from comfortable themself throughout. Chih’s uncomfortable because their situation is precarious. The magistrate is keeping the cleric in close confinement while maintaining the fiction that the cleric is a guest. And it’s uncertain to Chih what they need to do, or say, or promise – or undo, unsay or un-promise – in order to escape.

The reader is uncomfortable because the stories Chih collects are the kind that in our world used to be told only in whispers about survivors of shipwrecks and remote plane crashes or as part of proven historical incidents such as the Franklin Expedition and the infamous Donner Party. Yet from Chih’s perspective, these stories are so common that young clerics in training regularly go down to the archives to scare and/or disgust themselves by reading the worst of such stories available.

Of which there are MANY.

The stories that Cleric Chih does learn are each fascinating in the way that they explore how people and families process grief and trauma around experiences that are almost literally unthinkable. The nature of this particular assignment says a great deal about the mission of the Abbey as a whole, as well as its commitment to preserving the experiences and stories that many in power would prefer be hidden, suppressed or forgotten.

Because those are the stories that expose the truth of the human experience instead of the best of it.

But the stories of Cleric Chih’s missions for the Singing Hills Abbey, from the series’ beginning in The Empress of Salt and Fortune, are always fascinating and manage to always FEEL true, no matter how much they represent the story that someone wants to tell instead of any objective truth.

Even though I’m still thinking over the implications of THIS story, I’m already looking forward to the next. A Long and Speaking Silence is set to tell the story of one of Cleric Chih’s earliest missions. Origin stories are always fun. Sometimes dangerous, but fun to read. We’ll have to see how much danger Chih gets into, this time next year.